The Republican Liberty Caucus is offering two student internships for the Spring of 2012. Applicants must be enrolled in an accredited four-year college or have graduated within the last two years. Applicants should have good writing, organizational and internet skills and a familiarity with social media. An ability to work on your own and to complete projects on a deadline is essential.

Qualifications

• Current college student or recent graduate.
• Hard-working, self-motivated, and eager to learn.
• A belief in advancing liberty within the political system.
• Outstanding academic record.
• Strong technical and communications skills.
• Ability to work independently and with others.

Interns are expected to work 12 hours a week for 16 weeks during the Spring semester. There is no salary, but some expenses will be paid if needed. Interns will be supervised by a RLC board or staff member, but will be expected to work independently on specific assignments most of the time. They will not be expected to relocate and can remain enrolled and taking classes during the internship. Most of the work will be assigned and overseen online as a virtual internship.

Benefits

• Gain experience in political activism and advocacy.
• Learn technical and organizational skills.
• Can work while still attending classes.
• No need to relocate.
• Helping one of the fastest growing organizations in the Liberty Movement.

Interns will gain experience with administrative aspects of a nationwide advocacy organization, including activism initiatives, publicity and promotions, member support services, database maintenance, social media, working with party organizations and campaigns and event planning and management. This will be a valuable opportunity to gain experience, add to your political resume and advance the cause of liberty.

Application Deadline: Jan 20th, 2012
Start Date: January 30th, 2012
End Date: May 18, 2012
Location: Flexible
For Information Email chairman@rlc.org

If you are interested, please fill out the application form below:

An excellent and in-depth interview with Carolyn McKinney, Chair of the RLC of New Hampshire from Saturday. Good material here for other state chapters to pay attention to. And chapter leaders should remember that they should be prepared for an opportnity like this if it comes their way during the election cycle.

Once president Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) it appears that word went out to all of the Senators and Representatives who voted for it that the bill was fixed and they should write their constituents reassuring them that it the bill no longer authorized the indefinite detention of US citizens inside our borders by the military on presidential order and without due process of law.

So the reassuring emails were sent to all the constituents who had lobbied against the passage of the bill with the military detention provisions included, and a lot of them were pacified by these earnest statements from legislators who likely either did not read or did not understand the totality of the NDAA as it was finally passed. They were convinced that the addition of the statements “Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens” (1021.e) and “The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States” (1022.b.1) actually fixed the problems with the bill.

What they failed to understand is that the first statement is meaningless because the authors of the bill and the president believe that they already had the power to detain civilians in military custody without due process even before this bill was passed, and that the second statement still uses the term “requirement” which means that while military detention of US citizens is not required in all cases as it is with foreign citizens, it is still an option if ordered by the president. The new wording may be less egregious, but the fundamental problem of military detention remains an issue.

All they had to do to actually fix this bill was change the phrase “not required” in the original language to “prohibited” when referring to the military detention of US citizens and all of the complaints would have been satisfied. That they did not do this when every expert had told them it was the simple and obvious solution and that they instead engaged in misdirection and false assurances, demonstrates a cynical attitude towards the intelligence of the outraged public which had been loudly lobbying against this aspect of the NDAA.

While reassuring letters from Congressmen may have won over some former opponents, they are not fooling civil liberties lawyers who have actually read the bill and looked at the final wording in context. You don’t have to take my word for the persistence of military detention in the legislation because plenty of legal experts are speaking out against it. Sadly they don’t have the platform or authority of a letter from your trustworthy hometown Congressman.

On Justia.com Professor Joanne Mariner, director of the Hunter College Human Rights Program and formerly with Human Rights Watch, writes of the NDAA:

“Notably, section 1022(b)(1) does not exempt American citizens from the more important provisions in section 1021, which allow the military detention of broad categories of terrorist suspects. It does not, therefore, improve on the status quo by extending any new protections to Americans.

“Moreover, the specific exemption for American citizens in section 1022 could be understood as suggesting, by negative implication, that American citizens are covered by section 1021. Potentially reinforcing this view is the fact that an effort to amend section 1021 to exempt citizens failed in the Senate. If, in the future, judges decide to refer to the statute’s legislative history to help ascertain its scope, the lack of such an exemption may be determinative.”

And she dismisses the supposed promise of protection for US citizens from changes in the law, writing:

“the provision’s reference to “existing law” begs far too many questions. It is precisely the scope of existing law that is subject to vociferous debate and continuing litigation. Under the Bush administration, the law was interpreted to allow the indefinite detention of both citizens and non-citizens arrested anywhere in the world, including the United States.”

Benjamin Wittes, who is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution and co-director of the Harvard Law School-Brookings Project on Law and Security, writes in his FAQ explaining the NDAA that our rights were already essentially gone in practice and that the NDAA just formalizes this situation:

“The NDAA is really a codification in statute of the existing authority the administration claims. It puts Congress’s stamp of approval behind that claim for the first time, and that’s no small thing. But it does not–notwithstanding the widespread belief to the contrary–expand it. Nobody who is not subject to detention today will become so when the NDAA goes into effect.”

Although he does write off most of the concerns with the NDAA as being based on its ambiguities and ultimately left up to determinations by the courts, he also raises the additional concern that “the NDAA could theoretically be said to expand detention authority involves people held on the basis not of membership in an enemy group but mere support for one,” validating the concern that the applicability of military detention could be expanded to include people with no direct involvement in any terrorist activity.

In its press release on the signing of the bill, the ACLU is much more definitive about its concerns, quoting ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero:

““The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield.”

And stating that:

“Under the Bush administration, similar claims of worldwide detention authority were used to hold even a U.S. citizen detained on U.S. soil in military custody, and many in Congress now assert that the NDAA should be used in the same way again.”

What is clear from reading all of this analysis of the bill is that although the final revision successfully muddied the waters, it did not fix the basic concerns with military detention of US citizens. That the government believed they already had the power before the passage of the NDAA does not excuse the authors of the bill from responsibility for formally codifying this practice. What is also quite clear is that the reassuring letters from Congressmen are widely off-base, as nothing in the NDAA does anything to protect the rights of citizens.

It does to some degree reframe the debate, however. The argument is now much more basic, between those who believe that the NDAA should have been used as an opportunity to prohibit military detention and protect the rights of citizens, and those – like most members of Congress – who seem perfectly comfortable with giving the president the power to suspend foundational legal principles like Posse Comitatus and Habeas Corpus when even a hint of association with terrorism is involved.

This article appeared in slightly different form on Blogcritics Magazine.

The holidays are over. Legislators are heading back to DC and they already have your rights on the chopping block.

Senator Harry Reid has scheduled a vote for as soon as the Senate reconvenes on S. 968, the cynically named “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act,” which will allow any copyright holder to shut down any website with nothing more than an accusation of piracy, actually scrubbing its IP address from the internet and blacklisting content providers, all with no due process or hearing of any evidence or ruling from a court. Corynne McSherry of the Electronic Frontier Foundation described this act as “the worst piece of intellectual property legislation we’ve seen in the last decade.”

Senator Reid is working for media industry lobbyists who want the government to control the internet the way they do in China. Groups like the MPAA and Creative America have bought off enough Senators that he believes he can pass this bill quickly before anyone realizes what is happening in the post-holiday lull. He already has 40 sponsors from both parties, including big-government Republican traitors like John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Orin Hatch and even Marco Bubio.

The amazing freedom to innovate and to engage in entrepreneurial creativity which the internet has empowered is genuinely under threat from the proliferation of this kind of legislation. As the United States has lost the lead in traditional manufacturing, we have seen most of our growth in the online business sector. This is where the jobs of the new millenium are and it is where most of the hope for economic recovery lies. PROTCT IP and SOPA (its companion bill in the House) will have a chilling effect on this increasingly important sector of the economy and lead to wholesale violations of the privacy rights of individuals and businesses. It’s another bad idea from a government which has become too big and too eager to interfere in every aspect of our lives.

Our best hope right now is to win over as many Senators as we can and promote a Senate filibuster, but this is just the beginning of the fight. Please email your Senators now and be prepared for the next steps in the fight to keep the internet free and open for all Americans. We’ll keep you updated as the fight goes on to the House.

When sending your email, please do what you can to customize the text of the message.

One of the arguments used to dismiss Representative Ron Paul’s viability as a presidential candidate is that he is a libertarian masquerading as a Republican who appeals to a limited but high intensity audience, a popularity which will not translate into victory in most states. This argument is being used by pundits and media spokespeople to explain his impending victory in the Iowa Caucus.

It’s a reasonable argument based on his small but loyal following in the 2008 election, but despite its basis in fact it is not sufficient to explain Paul’s current success. The problem is that Iowa is anything but a state dominated by libertarian-leaning Republicans. In fact, Iowa’s Republicans are 54% evangelical Christians who are strongly socially conservative and have very little in common with more libertarian Republicans. If Paul’s only appeal were to Liberty Republicans then Paul would be doing poorly in Iowa where voters are anything but pro-liberty.

One measure of how libertarian Republicans in a state are is how active the Republican Liberty Caucus, which represents libertarian Republicans, is in that state. Iowa is an extremely weak state for RLC membership and involvement. Unlike most states, especially Republican dominated states, it has no active RLC chapter and it offered a single endorsee for office in 2010 and he did not win election. Compare that to New Hampshire where the RLC offered over 100 candidates for office in 2010 and has 81 members in the state House of Representatives.

New Hampshire Republicans lean libertarian and those in Iowa clearly do not. If his appeal was solely to libertarian voters then Paul would be dominating New Hampshire and bombing in Iowa where a libertarian message is not terribly welcome. Yet Paul is likely to do even better in Iowa than in New Hampshire, finishing in first or second in both states. He may also go on to pass Gingrich and take second in South Carolina which has a balance of libertarian Republicans and more socially conservative Republicans.

All of this suggests that contrary to the conventional wisdom, Paul is not a single-constituency voter, but rather a double-threat with two bases of support. He appears to appeal not only to the expecte pro-liberty demographic, but also to more traditional conservatives including a lot of religious conservatives. Paul’s balance of libertarian policies and personal inclinations towards social conservatism seems to resonate with both groups, giving him a much broader base than just the high-intensity ideologues most commonly associated with him.

In fact, based on the combination of his personal views and policy positions, Paul may not be the marginal candidate many assume him to be. With the exception of hardcore neoconservatives for whom an aggressive foreign policy is paramount – a viewpoint in disrepute after the failures of the Bush era – Paul has something to offer most of the other constituencies within the Republican party. His hands-off policies appeal to many social conservatives as well as libertarians. His clear personal religious faith attracts religious conservatives. His fiscally conservative policies appeal to both those who want government reform and to pro-business Republicans. In addition, the latest FoxNews poll shows asked voters who was the “true conservative” in the race and 40% answered Paul while 34% answered Santorum. Clearly Paul has created a larger niche as both the most Conservative and most Libertarian candidate in the race.

As the returns come in from Iowa it seems likely that Senator Rick Santorum will hold a strong third or maybe even win second in Iowa, sharing the conservative vote with Paul. But unlike Paul, Santorum has very little money and even less appeal to voters outside of that hardcore conservative base. Santorum polls very poorly in New Hampshire and without money he lacks the legs to catch up with other candidates. As Santorum’s Iowa surge fades it’s quite likely that many of his supporters – who may be “anyone but Mitt” voters – will move to Paul with whom he shares conservative common ground.

If it proves to be true that Paul has two bases of support within the Republican Party, winning over both serious conservatives and libertarians, that puts him in position to be the preeminent challenger to Romney’s broad but lukewarm appeal. Though the media may continue to argue that Paul is unelectable, with this clear evidence that his base of support is much broader than originally believed, this may come down to a very close two-man race between Romney and Paul.

A slightly different version of this article appeared previously on Blogcritics Magazine.